I det engelske, katolske tidsskriftet Catholic Herald skrev William Oddie nylig en artikkel der han gleder seg over utnevnelsen av en ny biskop (msgr Egan til Portsmouth), men der han også skriver om tidligere nuntiers – og engelske biskopers – aktive motstand mot pave Johannes Pauls og pave Bendikts ønsker for Kirken. Les selv – her er starten av artikkelen:
When Archbishop Antonio Mennini was first appointed as papal nuncio, we all had a good look at his record, for clues as to what his policy would be in one of the the most important areas of a nuncio’s work: making recommendations to the Congregation for Bishops and the Holy Father as to who to appoint to dioceses which become vacant. We were all well aware what the explanation was of the great conundrum, for the English Church, about the reign of John Paul II: why was it, when he had appointed most of our bishops, did nearly all of them go out of their way to undermine his vision for the Church? The answer was that a succession of nuncios had “gone native”, and had advised the Holy Father to appoint the men suggested to him by our own existing bishops, and especially by Cardinal Hume and then Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor: in other words, nuncios had been agents for the continuing project of the English bishops endlessly to perpetuate themselves and their de-Romanising, even secularising, vision for the English Church.
On Archbishop Mennini’s appointment, I hopefully speculated that an interview he had given in Russia (where he had previously been nuncio) might indicate that he was firmly behind the Pope’s agenda on the fight against secularisation, and might, therefore, be on-side when it came to the appointment of bishops here who would similarly be of the papal mind, on this and other key elements in the Ratzingerian analysis of where the Church needs to go. It was, I said, “good and hopeful stuff, which encourages one to hope that he will be using his obvious capacity to work out what’s going on in a particular secularised culture to help the Church here to begin the fightback, in the most effective way open to him – that is, by helping the Pope to appoint bishops who will do everything they can to implement rather than to undermine the Holy Father’s agenda.”
Well, the appointment of Mgr Philip Egan could hardly be a more striking demonstration that that is precisely what Archbishop Mennini does intend. To Portsmouth, the diocese in England where more than in any other the subversion of everything Pope John Paul stood for has proceeded unchecked ever since the appointment of its present bishop in 1989, the Holy Father has appointed the right-hand man of Bishop Mark Davies, probably the most passionately orthodox bishop in England today. …..